It’s easy to be cynical about members of Congress and your local elected officials, to believe that they don’t care about what you think. But my experience from talking with hundreds of them and their staff members is that they genuinely do care—they’re just overwhelmed and fatigued by the sheer number of impersonal communications they receive. They’ll sheepishly admit that it’s easier to deal with one lobbyist than 20,000 form letters from constituents. I can’t blame them. What I can do is build a better system for open government and civic participation.
We don’t need to build a new and improved legislative system, one robustly equipped to handle our every whim. We need delicate, distributive tools for placing political pressure on our democratic process. If we’re all going to be actively involved in government, we should gain techniques and tools to tread lightly on a system that has served us so well.
How do we do that? Via a few simple strategies in the short term and a few in the long term.
These simple strategies won’t solve everything in our legislative process, but they’ll serve to prop up a participatory structure as we build larger solutions to the challenge of widespread civic engagement.
Advocacy groups would have you believe that all you need to do to “make your voice heard” is to send off their form letter or sign their petition. This isn’t true; you’re more likely to be effective if you’re speaking with your own voice, at the right times, and speaking with some experience or knowledge of the position you’re advocating. This doesn’t mean you need to hold a PhD in advocacy; you just need to do a few online searches (or use KnowledgeAsPower.org) to find out the following:
Who are my legislators and when are they in session? Do they prefer email or would they rather I enter a letter in their web form?
Why does this issue matter to me? How am I affected by it? If you’re not affected, state the basic rationale for why you care. Cite a statistic or example, but don’t write a midterm paper on it. You should be able to explain your position on the issue with a few sentences.
Who, if anyone, is already advocating for my issue? Instead of seeing them as a vehicle for delivering your messages, find out from them how you can become better educated on the issue or more meaningfully involved.
Don’t believe the advocacy group deploring you to “Sign our petition!” or “Send this letter NOW!!!” While they might be pushing for a bill, they’re also just trying to build their membership lists and demonstrate their group’s influence. In the meantime, those mass mailings make your communications impersonal and ineffective. Instead, send a two-paragraph, personal email to your legislator explaining who you are and why you are affected or care about this issue. Send it to your elected officials only when a bill is in their house. Send it as early in the legislative session as you can. Even better, talk with your legislators outside of any legislative session. Make a follow-up call or two to “thank or spank” your legislator for her vote and be exceedingly polite when you make that call. Finally, don’t feel like you have to advocate on everything; find a few issues that are really important to you and stick with them. With less effort, you’ll find yourself making more of an impact, having more expertise on the subject, and feeling more confident in your role as a citizen. In the meantime, legislators will actually be able to hear you and the other people who live in your district.
Mark your email subject headings with a standardized subject headline. Instead of saying, “Vote YES on the Fluffy Bunny Bill!!” use the following basic advocacy headline (BAH) format to make finding and reading your email easier for your elected officials:
| Chamber Bill Number-Position-Zip Code-Zip Plus 4 Number |
In real life, this looks like:
| HB1234-PRO-98115-5542 |
which means:
| “Hi, I’m emailing you about House Bill number 1234, I’m pro on the bill, and I live in your district in this neighborhood in the 98115 zip code area.” |
Or:
| SB6987-Amend-90015-2345 |
which means:
| “Hi, I’m emailing you about Senate Bill 6987. I’m in favor of amending a portion of the bill. I live in your district in this zip code, and in a particular neighborhood.” |
Use BAHs to help your email slip into overflowing inboxes, receive more personalized responses delivered faster, and give the impression, “I know what I’m doing here.” For more examples of BAHs, see KnowledgeAsPower.org.
Activist groups need to participate in electronic advocacy more delicately. Although using form letters with members does result in more letters sent, it also means fewer letters are read, more communications get lost in the shuffle, and members of those groups become politically anemic. They should use BAHs in subject headlines, cease their arms race to send more form letters via web-form-breaking technology, and begin teaching their members how to engage at a higher-quality level with their own elected officials.
The following long-term solutions will require us to build strategic, standardized solutions to legislation tracking, constituent communications, and activism.
The United States should adopt a modern standard for disseminating its legislative and government information. This standard should be computer-readable (file formats such as PDF are easily read by humans, but computers just see them as a file, whereas computer-readable data allows computers to quickly organize and aggregate data); I suggest that the country go with the current standard, XML. While there are variations on XML—web services, RESTful web services, even XSL—this basic file format can allow for simple distribution of government information. Although each government in the United States functions like a small business that picks and chooses its in-house technology, the country should strongly consider making a national standard format for all governments to share their public information within. Not only would this make information much more accessible to individuals, groups, and government entities, but it would save them money and time. Private companies have thrived on selling reorganized government information, costing taxpayers millions of dollars—needless, expensive services that could be eliminated by standardizing government information into a format anyone can use.
New, low-cost services could spring up via the nonprofit and government sectors, helping all those involved in government do so with greater ease at lower cost. In the meantime, it would speed up the dissemination of legislative information and create greater government transparency. A great example of this standard being implemented is in my home state of Washington, where the state’s Legislative Service Center developed a low-cost web service, which is available for free to agencies within government and independent organizations (such as Knowledge As Power).
Government, nonprofits, and the private sector should band together to release open source tools for updating document management systems and distributing their information in XML. This effort could be supported by innovative foundations and philanthropists who value transparency and want to leave an indelible legacy of open government. Updating internal document management technology and creating bridges to release outdated document formats in XML will take investment; governments shouldn’t have to choose between transparency and basic services in their budgets.